ICTs - Legal and Safety Requirements

Technology is a vital tool in supporting and creating a meaningful and enriched learning experience for all students. Like most things though, where there is something good, there are also apparent risks and implications which require safety and legal requirements in place for students and more importantly students need to know what they are and how to prevent such circumstances. This is known as the duty of care, which you, the learning manager must uphold and to ensure you have covered in all aspects of teaching protect both yourself and the students.  This can be done by ensuring the school takes certain steps in order to relinquish any possibility of students not receiving an enriched lesson free from any online predator danger, students are safe both legally and ethically as well.

The first approach is that of ensuring the learning facilitators, are aware of their duty of care to students and how to protect them in a safe way and what measures are needed in order to protect them according to the law. This can be explained to each staff member through a professional development meeting which will allow teachers to understand and ask questions on their responsibilities. The professional development meeting can consist of firstly explaining what websites are blocked by the school, why they are, how teachers can block websites or how to create a virtual internet class where the only members are the ones in the classroom of the teacher and then how to do this for blogger, Wiki etc in order to protect the students due to having a duty of care to them. In this case, their duty of care to students when dealing with ICT that is internet based which is being used in an educational context.

After the teachers know what their responsibilities are, learning managers are to then inform the parents/guardians of the steps and implementations of the school taken in order to ensure them that safety measures taken to protect their children, this can be done by a letter home or parent/teacher night. Now that the explanation of what is being done to protect the student, it is up to the guardian or parent to sign and give their approval for their child to learn with the apparent risks.

Next step is to inform the students of the dangers that the internet has, this can be done either the start of the year (if you are using ICT’s all year round) or the term that you are introducing them to ICT, provide students with a conversation through these requirements, safety measures and express the seriousness of it and to report anything suspicious, explain this to the whole class, if students are sick then catch them up on their return to school. This is to be done before the students are exposed to the internet within the classroom.

The next way to ensure students safety whilst dealing with the internet is to do a ‘whole school approach’ with a list of standards/requirements for the students in order to protect and support the students. This can be a piece of paper in their book stipulating the rules, diary entries of what they did today on the computer, consequences or punishments for breaching these expectations of the teacher be sure to enforce this as well along with identifying to the student what they did wrong, otherwise students will not understand the severity nor the privilege of what is being done for them and the extra measures that take place, expectations (being the rules) and consequences of their actions.


Once students are able to go on the computers, explain the parameters; blocking of certain websites which can stop some sites which are beneficial for learning by the student but ultimately protect students from inappropriate websites. Tell the students to not disclose privacy and personal information across the internet; make sure you, as the teacher has been on the site beforehand making sure it is safe. Students may need to reveal some personal identification, like a name to distinguish between students, but other than that, websites shouldn’t need to know much more than that about a student or anyone. With the internet though there is inherent risks of course, this can expose students to cyber bullying, make sure students know what it is and to always come to the teacher if they feel something isn’t right or even suspicious.

Students are then faced with sourcing information after dealing with the social aspect of the internet, sourcing information can incur risks as well, one of which is copyright. It is important to educate students that they are not allowed to take information from a website and say it is their own in an assignment, for some students relate it to a real life context, for example; say it is the same as stealing a phone. It is basically saying that it is your own work which is an infringement on the copyright/plagiarism act; in order to use pieces of information from websites the students are required to reference and to paraphrase the text. Lastly, explain to students what a ‘credible’ source is because anyone can put anything on the internet since it is the World Wide Web. Students are to know that a credible source can be one that has a name and year, research that has taken place, education departments along with university or any research centre owned by the government, students are also to source information from more than one source which would ensure the credibility of the students’ statement if two or more sources are saying the same thing.

More information can be sourced from
http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=12575